American Experiment (51 page)

He heard serious discussion of only one topic from the planters who gathered at Mulberry Grove to sip port and Madeira: their need for a machine to clean the seeds from short-staple inland cotton. Whitney determined to meet this need. Planters were seeking a staple to lift agriculture out of depression. The main crop south of the Mason-Dixon Line in 1800, tobacco, had brought low prices on the international market for a decade and was exhausting the soil. Rice and indigo sales were realizing only small profits, thus threatening the large capital investments in slaves in the rice districts of Georgia and South Carolina and the tidewater of Virginia and Maryland. With an almost static population, the South was attracting few new settlers from the North or from overseas. Most farmers worked their small subsistence farms of from 100 to 300 acres with their families as the only labor. Planter and small farmer alike were looking for a cash crop to reap larger profits.

Eli Whitney had never seen a cotton boll. When he examined one, he found the fiber intertwined with seeds covered “with a kind of green coat resembling velvet.” Whitney later wrote his father that he “involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan of a Machine in my mind.” Spurning an offer of 100 guineas for his “little model,” he
decided to quit school and perfect an engine to clean cotton of its seeds. For six months Whitney labored behind locked doors in a basement room of the plantation house. By April 1793, he had designed a gin (short for engine) that used rotating wires in a cylinder to pull the lint through holes too small to pass the seed. Brushes revolving in an opposite direction cleaned the cotton from the wires. One man, using a hand crank, could produce fifty pounds of cleaned cotton a day.

Granted a patent in February 1793, Whitney formed a partnership with Phineas Miller, the manager of Mulberry Grove, to exploit the gin. They offered to clean any quantity of cotton at sites throughout the South for the price of one pound of clean cotton for every five pounds delivered with seed. By mortgaging the Greene estate, the partners secured enough money for Whitney to equip and man a workshop in New Haven to manufacture the gins. But the cotton gin was so simple that any competent mechanic could duplicate it; and many did. Whitney had to spend his small earnings fighting infringements on his patent. He never profited in proportion to the cotton gin’s impact on the national economy.

The most consequential innovation of the day, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin removed a bottleneck between the planting of cotton and exporting it to the voracious factories of Britain. Expanding sixtyfold from 1790 to 1815, the cotton trade caused an economic revival in the Old South and hastened settlement of the Southwest. Cotton was to replace all other crops in profitability. Supply did not catch up with British demand for years, and the price of cotton reflected the demand, staying at ten cents a pound except for 1811 and 1812, years of tension and then war between the United States and Britain.

Some sensed that a different kind of price might have to be paid. The “inventions of the cotton-gin, the carding machine, the spinning-jenny, and the steam-engine,” a southern journal noted, “combined to weave that net-work of cotton which formed an indissoluble cord, binding the black, who was threatened to be cast off, to human progress.”

Merchants in northern port cities began to share in cotton profits and in the general trade prosperity. With Britain and France at war, American merchant-shippers sold both countries produce of northern farms close to the coast—wheat, rice, flour, barreled beef and pork, and rum. Wagons brought farm products into New York City, soon to lead all other ports in trade owing to its auction sales of British manufactures; its regularly scheduled shipping service; and later its resident agents with branch offices in all the major cotton ports to supply credit, shipping, and maritime insurance to the cotton planter. Oxcarts laden with produce, rolled into Philadelphia, located on two waterways with an outlet to the sea, and into
Boston, leader in the China trade, with a large harbor where five hundred ships could dock, load, and sail for world ports. By the turn of the century Yankee ships had become familiar in harbors the globe, over.

It was a grand period for innovators and entrepreneurs. A merchant prince of Boston, Francis Cabot Lowell, profited first in the European trade by entering business with his wealthy merchant uncle, William Cabot. Willing to assume heavy risks, Lowell took charge of valuable cargo on his uncle’s ships. In 1795 British sailors boarded his ship to search for goods destined for France; they found no evidence of blockade running—but Lowell’s cargo found its way to France. The adventurous Lowell sent out eight ships to vie for world trade.

Lowell was typical of many merchant-shippers in Boston and New York. Their agents maintained contacts with village storekeepers who dickered for the produce of outlying northern farms. City merchants with their warehouses, overseas contacts, and easy access to credit could ship, insure, and sell northern farm produce or the tobacco and cotton of the southern planter, and planters boosted their profits by consigning their crop to an agent who would hold it, watch prices, and sell it at a favorable time. The merchant or his agent could advance credit to the large planter until the next crop came. It was a barter economy with scarce money. Credit in goods was extended to carry farmers from crop to crop by the storekeeper or merchant.

Lowell’s interests were wide-ranging—cotton trading, banking, and real estate with his building of India Wharf in Boston Harbor in 1808. Nervous, high-strung, inclined to overwork, he was known as a hardheaded businessman with family connections through intermarriage to the wealthiest and most prominent merchant families of Boston. He was also an economic leader who turned the merchant wealth of Boston from overseas shipping into cotton textile manufacture after the embargo in 1807-08 cut off trading ventures with Britain and France and after exports of agricultural products fell sharply. Merchants soon began to look for other profitable enterprises. Sensing that one day industry would rank as high as trade, Lowell led other Boston merchants to shift from overseas trade to the manufacture of textiles.

Moving crops to merchants in the cities was a central problem of the agricultural economy of America in 1800, especially in the North. In the South, planters could ship cotton and other products to port on numerous waterways, while in the North highways radiated from the principal eastern cities. Oxcarts from Concord, only twenty miles from the sea, could travel to Boston from the backcountry to supply city dwellers as well as to load
ships bound for foreign ports. But farther inland, only a few roads might run from the interior to a waterway. With construction and maintenance of roads in the hands of local officials, a basic road in 1800 was a cleared path through the trees, an improved one was crowned high with dirt and edged by a gutter. Farmers could profitably haul freight only very short distances. One wagonload of goods sent from Augusta, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia, took almost four months, at a cost of $1,000. The northern farmer who was not close to a market or a river exchanged his surplus crops for necessities for his family in the village store. He did not try to expand production; there was no market in which to sell.

Once again, it took some innovators and tinkerers to see the potential of steam as a source of power. Since that day during the Philadelphia convention when John Fitch had experimented with his boat
Perseverance
, traveling at a snail’s pace on the Delaware River, James Rumsey had also launched a steamboat on the Potomac River in 1787, and John Stevens of Hoboken, New Jersey, took the lead farther north. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, “a sort of mania began to prevail…for impelling boats by steam-engines.”

Two decades passed before steamboats began to operate on western waters; by then leadership in steamboat building and operating had passed to two men who brilliantly solved the problems of boat construction, business security, and profits. The resources and organizational talents of both Robert R. Livingston, New York manorial farmer, and Robert Fulton, mechanical genius, would make the steamboat a reality on the western waters of America.

By facilitating upstream travel on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the steamboat opened up the fertile country of the Northwest Territory stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. Settlers who homesteaded in the West after the War of 1812 could market their surpluses. Interregional trade changed local, self-sufficient economies to one commercial economy with each region producing its specialties for the national market—foodstuffs in the Northwest, cotton in the South, and capital, ships, and manufactured goods in the East. A traveler who knew the Northwest Territory wrote in 1817: “The center of population and wealth is rapidly inclining
westward; and within a very few years hence it will ‘cross the mountains’
…I look forward to the time, as at no great distance, when the great western rivers and lakes shall be covered with hundreds of steam boats, performing regular voyages between New Orleans and the numerous ports on the Mississippi and its great tributaries.…”

It was sheep-shearing time on Chancellor Robert Livingston’s estate, in the spring of 1810, and he had invited friends to drive over and admire his fine merinos. Elegant phaetons wound their way up a long avenue bordered by feathery locust trees and deposited the guests
at the manor house. Outside the visitors could admire the breathtaking view of the jagged Catskills across the Hudson River; inside, the tapestry, silver, and fashionable French furnishings that the chancellor had collected when he had been Jefferson’s Minister to France. After a lavish dinner in the greenhouse, among large ornamental plants, the guests strolled along grassy lawns and orchards to a park devoted to the care and feeding of merino sheep. Then they watched while fleece was cut from the merinos in great fluffy swaths. Some of the sheep were sold, at prices ranging from $40 to $1,000 a head.

The chancellor was a prime leader of the New York Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures, organized in the early 1790s by seventy-two farmers who had large holdings, time to keep abreast of writings on farming, and funds to experiment with promising agricultural methods. Descended from a family that owned over 300,000 acres originally granted by the Dutch, Livingston pursued his experiments on lands that bordered the Hudson for twelve miles and stretched east toward Massachusetts. One of the first scientific agriculturalists to urge the use of gypsum as a fertilizer, he built a mill to grind the substance. Writing in the society’s
Transactions
on soil conservation, he showed how sowing grass and clover on worn-out fields could restore fertility. But his passion was merino sheep, which he had discovered in France and imported to his own country. His first tiny flock—two merino rams and two ewes—were dirty brown in color, their wool greasy and closely curled, but after cleaning the wool seemed whiter and softer than any other. The society proudly circulated 1,000 copies of Livingston’s “Essay on Sheep.” After the trade embargo of 1808 helped produce a kind of merino sheep craze, Livingston and other gentlemen farmers expanded their flocks and built several woolen mills, to their further profit.

Livingston and his friends wanted to do more than improve their own knowledge, however; they sought to improve the farm practices of their tenants. But the gulf was too deep. Most of their tenants could not read, and those who could would hardly have studied the
Transactions.
The tenants on the feudal estates of the large New York landowners were even less productive and more slovenly in their farming practices than many freehold farmers. They tried to extract everything they could from the land at the moment. The average farm on the Clermont estate comprised about 70 acres of leased land, with usually about one-third of the acreage under cultivation. Rent for the land was twenty-five bushels of winter wheat, four hens, and one day’s “riding” for the landlord with a team of horses or oxen. The chancellor possessed all milling and mining rights to the land and exacted a “quarter-sale”—one-third of the selling price—if the tenant tried to sell his improved farm to another. Though many of the chancellor’s acres were vacant, he hoped the lands would fill up, values would increase, and he could sell at a large profit. But very often new settlers bypassed New York and went on to the western states where land was open for settlement and a farmer could buy cheaply from the government.

Farther north, life for the farm owner could be less benign. Thomas Coffin battled nature in 1825 to wrest a living from New England’s rocky soils. Summers could bring temperatures of 90 degrees and drenching rains that would rot ripening crops in the fields of his farm in Boscawen, New Hampshire. Winter was worse with temperatures as low as 20 to 30 degrees below zero and snows of two feet deep, forcing Coffin and his neighbors to break out roads to haul wood for his fifty-year-old frame house on Water Street. For heat northern farmers needed large quantities of wood—fifteen cords a year, on the average—so that constant cutting of wood, along with threshing and winnowing the wheat crop in the barn and washing the yearlings with soap, kept Coffin working all winter long.

Springtime brought plowing, using the common New England wooden plow with an iron colter to cut the sod. With this plow and strong oxen an acre was a good day’s work, given the rough, rocky soils of the farm. Coffin and his sons then harrowed the ground to break up roots. The next task was to sow seeds of barley, oats, and peas, followed by a brushing to cover the scattered seed. Coffin’s sons dropped corn and potato seeds by hand into small holes they had dug. Potatoes were an important part of the agricultural economy of the North. Thomas Coffin could produce 500 bushels of potatoes a year—enough for his family plus seed for next year and a surplus to sell or trade in Boscawen.

Coffin’s was a prosperous northern farm like many others of about 100 to 200 acres worked by the owner’s family. Farmers knew little about seed selection, soil composition, or fertilizers; waste was taken for granted; and land was plentiful; so most farmers would rather do as their fathers had always done rather than farm “by the book.” Typically, they planted only a small amount in crops, perhaps six out of one hundred acres. A little more land would be in meadow and about the same in weeds, brush, or woodland range. The rest of the farm lay fallow until the farmer had exhausted his tilled acreage and had to cultivate a new section. He then
let the exhausted land return to weeds and brush, which would supposedly bring it to fertility once again.